I love how Jeph Loeb's idea of suspense is to have Venom fight the Ultimates while asking for someone, never thinking to, y'know, say her sodding name.

It ended up feeling like coming into a film halfway through and knowing that the events you're watching should be important, but they mean nothing to you since you have zero context for what's going on. I really need to read Long Halloween or something, see why people think Loeb is a good writer, since his Marvel stuff has been fairly abysmal.

There are some choices I wasn't too fond off, like outing the sibling's relationship. it was like when millar outed apollo and midnighter. It was so much classier when ellis was just suggesting it, not making it a gimmicky deal. What goes around...

Also is it me or did Wasp decided to just not be of the asian persuasion anymore ? biased myopia in character design perhaps ?

It was difficult to live up to the hype and such a majestic run from the first two volumes.

Art looks tight and the colours are lovely, helps the line art and its readability. Joe Mad's video game style feels a bit weird especially after Hitch "you're in the book now" art. Probably will read better after a few issues. Paneling is itchy, lots of side shots jumping between each other, left right left right. We are a bit far from the cinematic panels of mr Hitch, where Brian could suggest a smooth dolly out just by choosing two key moments. Again, paneling will surely improve as he gets more pages under the belt.

Ending is a lukewarm cliffhanger, and the intrigue (stuff is happening behind the scenes, what could they be) doesn't really titillate the thrill glands. As of yet.

My biggest problem with it though is all the characters keep babbling about what is going on, what they are feeling, and what is at stakes for their own character.There's no subtext. What you read is truly what you get.

Will see after issue 2 if I'm just going to wait for the trade.

The ultimates 3 first issue feels a lot like any of the third installments of the marvel movies, really.

hyim-If you still dislike it after issue 2 why would you buy the trade? These days I'll only give my money to books that really resonate with me and continue to do so. There are just so many great books being made, I don't understand supporting something mediocre or worse. I'm not saying this book is, I haven't read it.

I for one thought it was a decent read and far,far from as bad as people are claiming it is.

You want bad?Read All Star Batman,Wolverine Origins,New Avengers,etc.

I really don't know what people were expecting,what Millar and Hitch did can't be topped.I got what I expected,Loeb mentioned this was going to be more straight forward superhero comics with a wee bit of mystery.

I'd also like to challenge the comment above about Loeb's writing on Heroes,he has written the best episodes of season 1 and managed to salvage the wreck of season 2 with an episode that surpassed anything this season

I really don't know what people were expecting,what Millar and Hitch did can't be topped.

See, now, I disagree with that. Ultimates 1 and 2 were pretty to look at because of Hitch's art but whatever depth Millar tried to put into the scripts tended to be undermined by his jingoistic tendencies. And as it seems that Marvel is unwilling to enforce the editorial control to keep creators getting books together on time, they certainly aren't going to excise the editorial control to tighten up the writing either. Ironic for a company that everyone bemoans as having "editorially controlled" titles.

I would like to see a good, solid writer with a good grasp of a writer's tool get a swing at one of the Ultimates series. Elsewhere I suggested Jeff Parker should take a swing at the book. After his work on Agents of Atlas I think that he could pull together an interesting and compelling look at the Ultimates. I don't really care about the "superstar" status of comic creators. I lived, and collected comics, through the time leading up to the Image Era of comics so I've seen where the road to "superstars" leads. There isn't any untoppable run on a comic because there is always someone new, eager and exciting that is working their way up the ladder, someone who is more interested in the books than the Wizard magazine interviews or the websites, who has their eye on the book and not their own PR. Those people are always going to be the ones who knock the ball out of the park.

The writing combines unmotivated 'biff' 'pow' superfighting with seedy, sex obsessed tone you don't find much outside fan fic and HollyOaks (possibly... I've heard), and characters have changed from the Millar/Hitch run for no discernable gain.

The art is plain confusing (try and following the transition from inside to outside the mansion on the first reading) and drowned in photoshop.

Jacen wrote: hyim-If you still dislike it after issue 2 why would you buy the trade?

You didn't get me right.I actually didn't dislike the issue, it just left with a meh feeling, and the the art has some production quality ( I also just love the colors, love the fact that you an see the ps bushstrokes layered atop each other, gives it a very nice lived-on wacom tablet feeling.) . I m going to buy issue 2 to see if it improves, then will decide if I pick it up as each issue ships. If it doesn't improve, I'll give ultimates 3 another shot (after all the reviews and so on go through, when the loeb/Mad run is actually considered on its merits) when the trade appears. It would be pretty smallminded of me to consider the whole book mediocre -a story that has yet to be written and to appear on shelves- on what may be just a lukewarm start.

To be honest, I had a very strong love/hate relationship with Ultimates. I thought it was mostly mindless popcorn comics, no characterization, and nearly everyone talked the same. It started to improve in vol. 2, but it was still mostly all spectacle. Yet I kept reading it because, well, popcorn can be fun.

This was not fun.

This was just really insulting. It felt like Jeph Loeb flipped through the previous issues, made a conscious decision to write like how he thought we expected it to sound, and then shat it out. He dumbed himself down for us and wore it on his sleeve.

Not to mention just ignoring things that had been established for years now. I'm not a continuity nazi by the longest stretch, and I'm definitely not against changing costumes or whatever the fuck, but when you decide to make them nearly identical to "regular" Marvel, you're already starting to defeat the purpose of the book. As if that's not bad enough, characters lose ethnicity (reverting to "default caucasian") and take up new goddamn ridiculous speech patterns (when the fuck did it EVER make sense for Thor to talk in Olde English?), further connecting them back to what they've purposely been removed from. I'm betting Nick Fury is back to being a crinkly old white dude.

The whole thing was such a farce. And I'm not such a fanboy where I complain about comics like this. If I read a bad comic, I wrinkle my nose, say "well, fuck, that was awful," and move on. But I feel genuinely pissed on here. By a fucking funny book writer.